Unholy Death Knight Rotation and Priorities

This section of the Unholy Death Knight guide provides an overview of all spec abilities, when and how to use them, as updated for World of Warcraft Legion Patch 7.2.5! This guide is currently updated and maintained by Veiss Versa, who has been a raider in various DPS capacities for 9 years, and is currently 7/10M in Nighthold (His guild is 9/10, I missed two kills). You can also find him on YouTube and Twitch.

Gespensterwanderung is our movement ability, increasing movement speed by 70% for 3 seconds or until we take any action. It also suppresses movement-impairing effects for its duration. It causes you to glide above the ground, which can cause problems traveling up stairs and over bumps in the road, so apply Glyphe 'Gespensterwanderer' as soon as you are able.

Priority List

In general, many of these things will not change terribly between builds, but may have increased or differing thresholds for action. The Standard opener assumes that you do not have any legendaries, trinkets, or Tier pieces which alter your rotation.

Playing Dunkle Richterin correctly is not terribly hard, but does require setup and forethought to optimize. Make sure all of these requirements are met before using Dunkle Richterin. With the buffs to her duration and ramping ability in 7.2.5, the Dunkle Richterin is now a very viable talent choice, but still requires some rather specific things in order to maximize her presence.

Once you have everything set up properly, you are good to cast Dunkle Richterin. This is the priority list you should follow after casting Dunkle Richterin on single target. After her duration is complete, you can return to the Standard rotation until Dark Arbiter is nearly off cooldown (See above notes).

Konvergenz der Schicksale is a powerful trinket for the Dark Arbiter spec. However, its effectiveness varies based on your raid's performance and kill times. A good general rule of thumb is that if the fight will last more than 5 minutes, you should see a damage increase from Konvergenz der Schicksale. Depending on the item level of your Konvergenz der Schicksale this may not be the case, common sense should tell you fairly well if your Convergence is a better option than another trinket you may have.

Holding Runes for an upcoming ability that you don't have enough runes for just yet, is not a bad thing; runes should not be spent immediately without proper setup, as improper rune planning and management can lower your overall DPS. This is commonly referred to as "Floating" runes.

Sitting on Runic Power if you do not have 3 cooling runes coming up is not necessarily bad. It is slightly better to overcap Runic Power than to waste runes. If you are playing with Schattenmacht, you will want to pool Runic Power for when Dunkle Transformation wears off. Start pooling about 8 seconds before you can start casting Death Coil to reduce the cooldown.

When using Schattenmacht, try to have Runic power ready towards the end of the duration of Dunkle Transformation, which will allow you to promptly begin reducing the cooldown.

When using Dunkle Richterin, I do not suggest waiting for a second Sudden Doom proc if you have one, and full Runic Power, with Dunkle Richterin coming off cooldown

If playing with Nekrose, it can be almost as effective to treat 2-target cleave as single target. In the talent section, I will discuss further why this is the case, but also why this is not optimal.

Technically, it can be better to let Virulente Seuche fall off of the target. However, this can greatly reduce your overall uptime, and is not necessarily advised Instead, refresh the debuff as close to 1 or 0 seconds as humanly possible.